Network communications demand ever-increasing amounts of transmitted information, and network technologies for higher data rates have been and continued to be developed. For example, the Gigabit Ethernet standard has been available for some time and is quite common. The Gigabit Ethernet standard specifies communicating using Ethernet technology at data rates of at least one Gigabit per second (Gbps), and both optical and copper-based solutions have been implemented to comply with the standard. At 1 Gbps or greater, optical cables tend to be used for longer distances, whereas copper cables tend to be used more for shorter distances due in large part to the promulgation of the 1000 Base-T standard, which permits 1 Gbps communication over standard Category 5 (“Cat-5”) unshielded twisted-pair network cable.
Presently, data rates of at least 10 Gbps have been standardized, while technologies and standards are being developed for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps data rates using Ethernet technology. As these data rates increase, copper-based solutions become more difficult to realize. For example, the permissible copper cable length becomes shorter or the transmission power requirements increase as the data rate increases due to distortion effects introduced by the high speed signal propagating through the cable. However, because of the cost of current optical solutions, interest in copper-based solutions persists, even at these higher data rates.